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Expertinent: Why the Obama &quot;Brand&quot; Is Working

Let's
be honest. Barack Obama is not on the verge of clinching the Democratic
nomination because of his policy positions--whatever his most
evangelical supporters might tell you. If policy was all that mattered
this year, Hillary Clinton would've won five or six of the last 11
contests instead of losing them all. When it comes to specifics,
there's simply not that much space between the candidates.

Obama's
success owes a lot, of course, to his message--the promise to pass
Democratic policies by rallying a "coalition for change." But watching
Obamamania over the past few weeks, I've become convinced that there's
something more subtle at work, too. It's not just the message and the man
and the speeches that are swaying Democratic voters--though they are. It's the way the
campaign has folded the man and the message and the speeches into a
systemic branding effort. Reinforced with a coherent, comprehensive program of fonts, logos, slogans and web
design, Obama is the first presidential candidate to be marketed like a
high-end consumer brand.* And for folks who don't necessarily need
Democratic social programs--upscale voters, young people--I suspect
that the novel comfort of that brand affiliation contributes (however
subconsciously) to his appeal.

Seeking expert opinion, I tested my hypothesis on leading graphic designer and critic Michael Bierut, who was kind enough to dissect Obama's unprecedented branding campaign--and show me how it's helping his candidacy. Excerpts:

(*UPDATE: A reader points out that "Reagan had one hell of a
marketing strategy." No doubt. Every presidential candidate
since Richard Nixon in 1968 (at least) was
actively "marketed" to the American public--I'm not denying that. The
point I'm trying to make is that Obama's marketing is much more
cohesive and comprehensive than anything we've seen before, involving
fonts, logos and web design in a way that transcends the mere
appropriation of commercial tactics to achieve the sort of seamless
brand identity that the most up-to-date companies strive for.
Apologies for the misunderstanding. I definitely could have been clearer.)

What are the elements of the Obama brand?To start, he has this way of writing Obama in upper and lowercase in a serif font and juxtaposing it with that "O" symbolhe has--the blue ring with red and white stripes disappearing into it,
making the white form inside the blue look like what I suppose is meant
to be a rising sun. [See photo above]

That's his "logo," right?Right.
A lot of times when he's at a podium what you'll see is, centered right
beneath him, at the very top of the blue field that usually says
something like "Change You Can Believe In," it'll be just that little
symbol, functioning in the same way the Nike swoosh does. People look
at that and know what it means, even though it's just an "O" with some
stripes in it.

Has any other campaign ever "pulled a Nike"?Well,
Bush did that the last time around with the letter "W," to some degree.
You would see somebody with the letter "W" on a bumper sticker, and it
would kind of work that way. But Obama has gotten there much quicker
and a little more gracefully, if you ask me.

How else is Obama's design different than what has come before--or what rival campaigns are doing?He's the first candidate, actually, who's had a coherent,
top-to-bottom, 360-degree system at work. Whereas, I think it's more
more common for politicians to have a bumper-sticker symbol that they just
stick on everything and hope that that will
carry the day.

The
thing that sort of flabbergasts me as a professional graphic designer
is that, somewhere along the way, they decided that all their graphics
would basically be done in the same typeface, which is this typeface
called Gotham.
[See "Change We Can Believe In" sign, above] If you look at one of his rallies, every single non-handmade sign is in
that font. Every single one of them. And they're all perfectly spaced
and perfectly arranged. Trust me. I've done graphics for events --and I
know what it takes to have rally after rally without someone saying,
"Oh, we ran out of signs, let's do a batch in Arial." It just doesn't
seem to happen. There's an absolute level of control that I have
trouble achieving with my corporate clients.

Then if you go to the Web site,
it's all reflected there too--all the same elements showing up in this
clean, smooth, elegant way. It all ties together really, really
beautifully as a system.

Is Obama's stuff on the level with the best commercial brand design?I think it's just as good or better. I have sophisticated clients who
pay me and other people well to try to keep them on the straight and
narrow, and they have trouble getting everything set in the same
typeface. And he seems to be able to do it in Cleveland and Cincinnati
and Houston and San Antonio. Every time you look, all those signs are
perfect. Graphic designers like me don't understand how it's happening.
It's unprecedented and inconceivable to us. The people in the know are
flabbergasted.

What does that say about his campaign?My feeling, in my own narrow sphere as a professional graphic designer, echoes a little bit what Frank Rich wrotein his column on Sunday, where he was talking about Hillary Clinton's
argument that Obama doesn't have the experience to run the country
properly, and how you only needed to look at how her own campaign has
been managed to see the flaw in that argument. I sort of see the same
thing. I'm not sure that the commander-in-chief proves his mettle by
getting everyone at his rallies to set their signs in the same
typeface, but as someone who knows how hard that is, I'm very impressed.

The
specific choices are also made in really good taste and I'd say to
certain degree they also philosophically align with what his position
is.

What do you see as the "philosophical implications," to use a highfalutin phrase, of Obama's design choices?There
are a couple of levels. There's the close-in parlor game you can play
about what all these typefaces actually mean. Gotham was a typeface
designed originally for GQ magazine,
so it's a sleek, purposefully not fancy, very straightforward,
plainspoken font, but done with a great deal of elegance and taste--and
drawn from very American sources, by the way. Unlike other sans serif
typefaces, it's not German, it's not French, it's not Swiss. It's very
American. The serif font that he often uses to write Obama is delicate
and nuanced and almost, not feminine exactly, but it's very
literary-looking. It looks very conversational and pleasant, as opposed
to strident and yelling. It's a persuasive-looking font, I would say.
But that's putting these things on couches and pretending they have
personalities.

Right. It's sort of hard to imagine in a
voter in Cleveland (or a Newsweek political blogger from New York, for
that matter) interacting with Obama's design on that level. How does it
affect those of us who aren't graphic designers?Well, I'm
teaching this class at the Yale School of Management, and we were just
talking about brand management and politics--exactly this thing before
we got on the phone. And one of the things that came up in the
conversation is, if you think about it, the challenge for someone named
Barack Hussein Obama is that he's such an unprecedented figure in
American politics--so much so that everything he's trying to do is, in
a way, trying to make him look smoother and more normal. Someone said,
"Well, why shouldn't he have revolutionary looking graphics--graphics
that make him look like grassroots, like an outsider? Things drawn by
hand, things that look forceful and avant-garde." But I think he's
using design in a way to make him look as normal, as comfortable, as
inevitable as a brand can look in American life. Those are really
deliberate, interesting choices. Whether or not a sans serif font like
Gotham looks more "American" than a Swiss font like Helvetica, that's
in our imaginations to a certain degree. I think it's much more
incontrovertible that he's actually using the seamlessness of this
branding to convey a candidacy that's not a dangerous, revolutionary,
risk-everything proposition--but as something that is well-managed and
has everything under control.

How much have brands like
Target or Apple or Volkswagen--these high-design, but essentially
accessible brands--paved the way Obama? I think they're all
very much of a kind. I would name those three brands as ones that share
a lot with the way this candidate is presenting himself. They're meant
to look transparent, open, accessible and democratic to a certain
degree. Non-intimidating. You don't feel that this stuff is all being
hatched in corporate boardrooms with ad agencies and marketing experts
at the table. They all sort of look as if people like you are talking
to people like you. Of course, there's a lot of forethought put into
all this stuff. But in the end, being able to project an identity that
people are willing to credit with being authentic is a hard thing to
do. But those brands, and the Obama brand, are managing to do it.

With
all three of those brands, though, design has in some sense become a
form of content. I wonder if something like that is happening with
Obama--that people find the seamlessness of his brand compelling and
comforting, and they gravitate to him because of it, as opposed to any
specific policy differences with Clinton. I'm wondering if you see that
reflected in Obama the same way you do in, say, Target or Apple vs.
Wal-Mart or Dell?Oh yeah. There is a difference in the way the
experience is delivered between Wal-Mart and Target. Target is gambling
on the proposition that people want something that's got more style,
that seems more accessible, that's less strident, that's less
one-dimensional, that offers a higher comfort level--and they're
willing to go with it. There are interesting policy distinctions that
you can make between the Democrats and the Republicans and even between
Hillary and Obama. But as has been said, the differences are not so
pronounced that you're going to be driven inexorably to one over the
other. So I think that the affiliation with a brand seems to be
transcending these other things. For good or for ill, that seems to be
the way the race is playing out this year.

What about Hillary?She's been morphing her Web site* specifically to look like his all the time, so that seems obvious. McCain, to his credit, looks all the more militaristic and blunt and harsh in a way, so I appreciate him sticking to the authenticity.

Do
you think there's a risk that such a strong reliance on branding and
design encourages the perception that Obama is all style and no
substance?There's always that risk, particularly in
America--the suspicion that if something looks good, it can't possibly
work. If someone's really beautiful, they can't be smart. I don't know
why. It's like, in Italy, they don't seem to have that problem, oddly
enough. A lot of that had to do with the fact that good-looking,
well-designed stuff used to cost a lot -- it used to be a class
divider. But now, with the brands you were mentioning, with Target,
with Apple, they've become much more democratic and egalitarian in
terms of access. Certainly, he's been attacked for being good-looking
with no substance. But that's what you would do if you were losing to
this guy.

“The president used America’s military forces not against any real threat but as toy soldiers, with the intent of manipulating a domestic midterm election outcome,” said three professors, including two retired Army colonels.

Law and Justice "is fanning political divisions further by spewing conspiracy theories and using language that plays on people’s emotions and strengthens a sense of victimhood,” Zselyke Csaky, an expert on Central Europe at Freedom House, told Newsweek.